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Espionage case reveals double standard on secrets

Navy Sub.-Lt. Jeffrey Paul Delisle is escorted from court after a hearing into his espionage case. (Andrew Vaughan / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By Andrew Mitrovica

Sat., Jan. 28, 2012

It never ceases to amuse me how the sordid, often mundane world of espionage elicits near orgasmic media coverage. The latest example of this unbridled giddiness comes in the wake of espionage-related charges against a junior Canadian Navy intelligence officer, who enjoyed “top secret” security clearance — truth be told, it’s not a particularly sensitive security classification but you won’t hear that from much of the press — for allegedly feeding hush-hush information apparently to the Russians.

This earned Russia a predictable diplomatic rebuke, as a few of its embassy staff in Ottawa were summarily sent packing. It’s an old, silly pantomime played out again and again by largely ordinary and not so bright people.

Traditionally, intelligence officers (an oxymoron if there ever was one) or spies involved in the intelligence trade “sell out” their countries for a few reasons, usually in this order: money, sex, love and, in rare cases, ideology.

We may or may not learn what motivated this latest so-called betrayal. Word of the officer’s arrest has prompted the usual intelligence experts to trot out the usual apocalyptic pronouncements about how this “scandal” may yet constitute the most grievous and injurious security breach in Canadian history.

Oh, please.

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I believe it’s unlikely that a junior intelligence officer would be privy to the kind of secrets that could cost lives or irreparably damage Canada’s strategic alliances.

I may be proven wrong about this, but what I do know is that the Americans, British and our European partners have certainly had their fair share of quite breathtaking espionage debacles. So they’re unlikely to squawk too loud.

The hyperventilating academics and security experts can take a few deep breaths and calm down.

What I do find particularly instructive about this episode is how, in a technological age where whistleblower organizations like the notorious or laudable — take your pick — WikiLeaks, have rendered the word “secret” almost irrelevant.

And how the work of Julian Assange and other whistle-blower sites have effectively stripped the “ownership” of these so-called secrets from the powers-that-be and made them available for anyone with access to a computer to occasionally see.

It’s instructive because, to some extent, the netherworld of secrets, once jealously guarded by intelligence agencies and the mandarins they report to, can no longer — if they ever could — exercise absolute control over the secrets.

Hence their contradictory and hypocritical response to Assange’s and the naval officer’s actions.

Assange was cast as almost the devil incarnate. He was condemned by Ottawa, Washington and London, among many other capitals, as a dangerous self-promoter who, by working in concert with several reputable news organizations, deliberately released mounds of secret information that fatally undermined how diplomats do their painstaking work and caused irreparable damage to the strategic interests of a slew of western governments.

Last time I looked, none of these dire predictions had come to pass.

I know more than a few diplomats and can assure you that despite their uncharitable view of Assange, they continue to do their work, writing oodles of cables marked (pro-forma) “top-secret” and the ever-tumultuous world muddles along.

Let’s now consider the response to the naval officer’s alleged misconduct. Defence Minister Peter MacKay has assured us that, while serious and unseemly, the intelligence officer’s actions would not erode Canada’s strategic standing with its international partners and our reputation as a reliable ally would be untarnished.

According to this self-serving calculus, Assange, the spiller of so many secrets, is a provocateur who single-handedly destabilized the world of intelligence and diplomacy.

This hyperbolic reaction is proof, not so much of the consequences of the so-called secrets having been made public, but that an outsider gained access to them and then revealed them to the world.

(By the way, Assange didn’t “dump” the secrets indiscriminately. He, and his small, industrious team and the media partners he worked with, carefully reviewed the documents, assessed their importance and news value and released them in installments to shed important light what powerful diplomats, government officials and the military have been up to in our name.)

But when a member of the fraternity — like the naval officer — allegedly spills other secrets to a former adversary and now nominal ally, the hysteria vanishes and is replaced by soothing reassurances. (We heard the same line when Canada’s apparently absent-minded ex-foreign minister Maxine Bernier left behind a binder marked top-secret at his biker-linked girlfriend’s place.)

The message of all this from the powers-that-be to Canadians is clear: They’re our secrets, not yours. When we lose them, it’s really no big deal. But if some outsider gets a hold of them and shares them with the public, it’s time to reach for a placard that reads: “The end is near.”

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